David Starkey is already a "cross-platform" historian, best known for his projects spanning books and TV. However, there's now an app for that too. It's called Kings and Queens, and while its textual basis is Starkey's Crown and Country book, the iOS app is no cash-in.

Developed by Trade Mobile, the app uses a timeline user interface to explore the history of the English monarchy, with a wealth of background material to dive into, and entirely new footage of Starkey explaining the key points. In an interview with Apps Blog, he fizzes with enthusiasm about the potential of apps for his work.

"It's a case of the technology catching up with what I wanted to do," he says. "Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes."

Starkey describes the process of writing his books and filming his shows as a "struggle for linearity", reducing something that is three-dimensional into a two-dimensional narrative. He also talks about his early days studying for a doctorate, where he shunned a typewriter in favour of "writing into pencil onto scrap paper, then chopping it up, moving it around ... cutting, pasting and erasing, and only then typing it up".

A stint as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the late 1980s gave Starkey a moment of revelation: word processing on an Apple Mac.

"The technology had caught up with what I wanted to do, as typewriting was utterly antithetical to my mental processes," he says. "And that's what Trade Mobile have done with the platform we used for Kings and Queens: it reflects the creative processes of the writer. All those things you've had to level out to make the line of narrative [for books and TV] you can put back in. I no longer have to take these decisions that involve sacrifice. The reader can arrive at the judgement for themselves."

Is there a risk here though? Starkey gleefully pooh-poohs the idea that TV dumbs down history, saying that the skill of condensing subjects like the Protestant Reformation into a couple of hundred words for a piece to camera has "greatly improved" him. So he admits that being able to put all that extra material back in to an app has its dangers.

"The risk is that creativity is also about limitation and observing rules," he says. "The great risk is that you get complete floppy free-form – the sort of rubbish there is on the web, where nobody has exercised discipline. It's why so much of the web is colonised by pub bores – there's no one to rein them in!"

Filming the video footage for Kings and Queens involved Starkey adopting a more conversational tone than might be expected from his TV shows, reflecting the personal nature of tablets and smartphones, and also their interactivity.

"It's the conversational tone you might get over dinner or in a tutorial," he says. "Only bad teachers lecture at a tutorial. With the app, you've almost got to imagine that someone has just asked you a question, so the tone is a response, a reply. By that, the app will also directly reflect the personality of the author."

The default marketing line around book-apps like Kings and Queens can be 'it's bringing x to a younger audience', based on the assumption that apps are way to interest young people in dry or complex subjects. That wasn't the case here, and deliberately so: Starkey is characteristically blunt about the assumption that tablets and apps are for the young.

"This is one of the most ludicrous and patronising things about what some people are saying," he says.

"The idea that it's only the young or people who've grown up with a technology who can appreciate it. Complete nonsense! My generation [Starkey is 66] is highly intelligent and highly adaptable, and we've gone through this series of extraordinary technological leaps. Unlike today's young who were born with this world, we've shown the meaningful thing, which is adaptability, and the ability to encounter radically different new technologies repeatedly."

Kings and Queens is as much for older users, then. "The only problem will be rheumatism!" he says, with a hearty laugh.

Starkey's recent public brush with today's youth came in the Jamie's Dream School show, where as one of the teachers, he was visibly unhappy with the attitude of some of his tearaway students. How does he feel about apps and tablets being used in schools?

"The use of computers and other mobile devices has to be so carefully controlled. As we discovered with Dream School rather awkwardly, it can become a source of total disruption that destroys the co-operative learning experience," he says.

"The great problem with these things is that they can individuate what should be collective, in a very dangerous way. I would much prefer to see these things primarily regulated by the teacher. If you listen to some of the extreme believers of the use of computing in teaching, there's no reason why children should ever go to school at all! It's completely absurd."

All this is said with laughter - Starkey visibly enjoys playing up to his reputation for plain speaking - but he stresses that his point is a serious one. He sees apps playing an increasingly important role in the classroom, but as a spur for discussion mediated by a teacher, rather than a solo learning experience.